Month: November 2016

I learned while at ALA Midwinter that I’d been fundamentally missing a crucial and important step in the creation of subject headings. I wasn’t alerting anybody! I was creating the headings in the ClassWeb system and had somehow thought that people at LC were automatically alerted to their existence. That is not the case.

I should’ve been sending an email to SACO each time I created a heading needing evaluation.

In conclusion — I chastise myself for having been critical in my presentation at the Faceted Subject Interest Group at ALA Annual ’16. Though the process is complicated, I wasn’t in a position to criticize it when I didn’t full understand it.

Original post: Partly for my own edification, and partly for just seeing a bit more about how sausage is made, I’ll be keeping track here of when I propose an LCSH, versus when it’s evaluated by the PSD. (Also including ones I worked on if I didn’t propose them directly)

An asterisk means I sent them to Paul Frank, which I note because his power to push them into the queue quickly is significant.

New LCSH is not going to fix this

The following subdivisions will be added to lists of free-floating subdivisions:

H 1147, Animals
$x Phenology (May Subd Geog)

H 1156, Literatures
$x Garifuna authors

H 1195, Land Vehicles
$x Motors $x Exhaust manifolds

Also, I’m sure you know that ‘White privilege’ was rejected again by the PSD. April Hathcock has written about this, and you should go read what she wrote. I want to add that this is the second time that they’ve rejected the term, and this time it strongly seems like they’re not amenable to reevaluating it.

“LCSH does not include specific headings for groups discriminated against. Numerous works about white privilege have been assigned the headings Race discrimination and Whites—Race identity, and the meeting wishes to continue that practice. ”

Leaving aside the fundamental misunderstanding of what white privilege is that this statement belies, it sounds like barring a major shift in their practices, they won’t revisit this decision.